How can you grow midlevel donors?

Farra Trompeter: Welcome to the Smart Communications Podcast. This is Farra Trompeter, co-director and worker-owner at Big Duck. In today’s episode, we’re going to ask the question: How can you grow midlevel donors? And I’m excited for today’s guest, Alia McKee, who I’ll tell you more about in a moment. But Alia is a blast from the past, actually, my past. We worked together at a company called Donordigital 20 years ago and have joyfully stayed in touch, and I am happy to have her join us today. Let me tell you a little bit about Alia. Alia uses she/her pronouns and is a seasoned fundraising strategist, market research expert, and leadership coach, who has led Sea Change Strategies for nearly 20 years. She guides mission-driven organizations through transformative growth and relishes helping nonprofit leaders navigate the complex, professional, and personal challenges they face as change makers. Alia, welcome to the show and welcome back to working with me briefly, as it may be.

Alia McKee: Thank you, Farra. I’m so excited to be here, and yes, what a blast from the past. I always love when our paths cross, though. It’s wonderful.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah, first initially in San Francisco and now here in Brooklyn.

Alia McKee: That’s how it goes.

Farra Trompeter: And, of course, virtually on the airwaves. So, at Big Duck, we provide several fundraising-related services, including donor communications plans, fundraising, campaign identity and collateral, branding of donor programs, and various workshops to build the skills and strengthen the connection between development and communications. Lately, we’ve been talking to some of our clients about a growing section of their community: midlevel donors. And at the same time, we don’t want to only value people’s engagement purely by the level of their financial contributions. So, with that as the backdrop. Let’s start with the basics. Alia, what is a midlevel donor? How do organizations define that, and what led you and your team to focus on engaging midlevel donors?

Alia McKee: Great questions. So, typically, a midlevel donor is someone who gives a significant contribution to an organization, enough to stand out from grassroots or membership, but not quite enough to land in a major gift officer’s portfolio. So, for most of the organizations I work with, a midlevel donor contributes between $1,000 and $10,000 cumulatively over a 12-month period. But that being said, some organizations start their midlevel floor at $500, others set a ceiling as high as $15,000, $25,000, even $50,000 in some cases. The key is to define thresholds that reflect your donor base and organizational structure. So, that way you’re creating a one-to-many experience that delivers meaningful personalization at scale to a large pool of committed supporters. I like to think of major donors as one-to-one. Midlevel is one to many, and of course, membership grassroots is one to thousands or hundreds of thousands.

Alia McKee: To your second question about how I started looking at midlevel, it started way back in 2008, right after we stopped working together, nearly. My firm was conducting a study of nearly 3,000 high-net-worth individuals and their digital habits. Because back then, a lot of folks were like, “We shouldn’t communicate with high-net-worth individuals online because it might minimize their engagement with us.” And so we were looking to investigate that. While we were doing that, we stumbled on a really striking statistic that 1% of these donors were giving 34% of total revenue, and these donors, who we were interviewing, were contributing between $1,000 and $10,000 annually. Surprise, surprise, they wanted to be communicated with online and digitally, and they were really frustrated because they were giving a significant contribution, but often they were being suppressed from any communications because they were being suppressed from grassroots membership communications, and they didn’t yet merit the attention of a major gift officer. So they were in this no person’s land and really being ignored. And so since then, we’ve really focused on how we can engage these donors, how we can reorganize organizations, so that way these donors get stewarded appropriately because they represent a major opportunity.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah, as you were talking, I’m imagining them floating around in fundraising purgatory.

Alia McKee: Exactly.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah. So, in the spirit of getting them out of purgatory and hopefully moving into heaven, I don’t know this is, this is going to be where I can end this metaphor in this conversation.

Alia McKee: I like the metaphor. I like it.

Farra Trompeter: Well, we’ll go with it for now. Your team at Sea Change Strategies produced a report called The Missing Middle: a cross-vertical study of midlevel donors. We will be sure to link to that directly in the show notes at bigduck.com/insights. But until folks get to download and read it, I would love to talk about it. In that report, you studied 36 nonprofit organizations, and there’s just so much great stuff in it. My favorite are the findings related to psychographics with three profiles, and we’ve actually talked about donor profiles on the podcast before. We know that no group, including midlevel donors, is a monolith, but I’m curious if you can share with our listeners, what did you learn from that study about the motivations, the beliefs, and the values of midlevel donors based on these insights from 36 nonprofits?

Alia McKee: As part of the study, we surveyed over 6,000 midlevel donors representing, as you said, 36 organizations. And what was so interesting is when we did a segmentation analysis of the respondents, examining their levels of involvement, information needs, and engagement preferences, three distinct behavioral profiles emerged. I’ll name them and then I’ll describe them in more detail. So the first is All Business, and 41% of the sample were All Business. Engagement Seekers were the next profile, and 32% of the sample are Engagement Seekers. And then there’s a profile we call Hands-on Donors, and 27% of the sample were Hands-on Donors.

Alia McKee: So, just very quickly, All Business folks, as the name implies, prefer a low-touch experience. It’s like, “What would my dad want?” Right? When I think of an All Business donor, they’re the most transactional of the segments. They renew their gift annually, most likely at year-end, with very little prompting. They show limited interest in deeper engagement for these donors. Excessive stewardship, like extra phone calls or event invitations, may actually be off-putting. They tend to prioritize organizational efficiency, and they prefer that a higher percentage of their gift goes directly to programs. And notably, they are the oldest cohort in the sample.

Alia McKee: In contrast, you have Engagement Seekers, and we believe they offer perhaps the greatest potential for deepened relationships because they express strong interest in participating in many of the engagements nonprofits can provide, like, virtual events; they want to take action, especially locally; they want to watch your videos; they want to consume and share impact reports; they want to look at the infographics; they want to take part in surveys and focus groups. They’re the most likely of the three segments that say they plan on giving more in the coming year, and they are the most likely of the three segments to say that they’ve included an organization in their estate plan. So, in contrast to All Business, this group really wants to feel connected and valued, and they’re telling us that meaningful engagement is going to influence their long-term commitment.

Alia McKee: The third group are Hands-on Donors, and these folks sit at the total end of the spectrum from All Business folks because they are already deeply embedded in the life of the organizations they support. They are volunteers, they are board members, they are community ambassadors, and they see combining their personal involvement with their significant financial investment as their contributions. This group reports the highest average largest gift of any segment, coming in just under $20,000. This group also skews more female than the overall sample and really remind us that proximity and participation can be powerful drivers of generosity. At Sea Change, we’re like you at Big Duck, our philosophy is that donors matter, no matter how much they give, that their time and talent is also really, really important. And with Hands-on Donors, time and talent is one of the big ways that they show their commitment.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah, great. Yeah, and we also believe, you know, everyone matters, right? The volunteers, the people who just signed the pledge but haven’t quite contributed yet. Those are all important to continue to engage, but it’s definitely worth a deep dive on this. So, given everything you just shared, how might a nonprofit use these insights to inform their communications with midlevel donors? Can you maybe share any examples of how applying this data could work in practice?

Alia McKee: One of the most actionable takeaways is the opportunities to segment out All Business folks from those who want to participate more deeply. So, I think it might be hard right now for groups to try to separate out Engagement Seekers from Hands-on Donors, but those All Business folks are pretty easy to identify. EarthJustice is a great example of an organization putting this into practice. I call what they’re doing “The Harry Potter midlevel sorting hat”. Because what they’ve done is they’ve created a seven-part multi-channel qualification series for their Justice Partners, their midlevel donors, and the goal is simple. They’re trying to invite donors to raise their hand by responding to any one of these seven pieces as an Engagement Seeker or a Hands-on Donor, right? Those who respond are routed into a high-touch portfolio managed by one of two midlevel donor officers. These donors receive a steady cadence of that stewardship, that Engagement Seekers and Hands-on Donors say they want; they’re getting thank you calls; they’re getting forwarded updates from leadership about programmatic impact; they’re getting extra thank yous at year-end or additional Zoom gatherings tailored to donor preferences. Meanwhile, if you don’t respond to any one of these seven pieces of collateral, you are separated into the All Business category. You still get touchpoints because you remain within the branded Justice Partner membership team. You just get a reduced frequency of solicitations while continuing to deliver the value promise of Justice Partners through the quarterly magazine, through some town hall invitations, and a dedicated point of contact that they can reach out to if they want to.

Farra Trompeter: It’s so great that you just mentioned, I don’t think we talked about this before recording this today, but I am two days after this podcast releases, I will be presenting at AFP New York City’s Fundraising Day about branding your giving programs, like branding your midlevel program with our client at the International Rescue Committee, but also someone from EarthJustice who’s going to talk about Justice Partners. So it all, it all connects.

Alia McKee: It does connect. It does connect. And yeah, the work that you all did with the IRC and that branding work is fantastic. We’re working with them on an insight panel, and I think the Rescue Collective ecosystem is brilliant.

Farra Trompeter: Oh, thank you. Well, we did a webinar with Ishmam from IRC that we’ll link to in the show notes if folks want to check that work out. Now, coming back to this, both of our companies also believe that nurturing relationships is really at the heart of good, well, good communication generally, but particularly good donor communication and engagement. And with all of the nonprofits that you’ve worked with, how often do you see that they’re able to upgrade midlevel donors to major donors or legacy donors? What does retention look like for midlevel versus other donor categories? I just want to dive a little more deeply into how these insights can impact how you might cultivate and steward these midlevel donors.

Alia McKee: Midlevel donors are incredibly loyal, Farra. That’s one of the clearest signals from our research and our experience in practice. Many organizations, and I’m sure you’re seeing this, are seeing multi-year retention rates of their midlevel donors above 60%. Some hit 70%. That is exceptional compared to other donor categories. These donors are going to stick with you. In our research, they said they’re going to stick with nonprofits they care about in times of political upheaval, in times of economic uncertainty, and in times of global instability. So, their loyalty and retention is through the charts. That said, as of now, this sample doesn’t really look like a hot major donor prospect pool. Many of the organizations I work with like to think of their midlevel programs as both a destination and a stepping stone into major giving. This study puts a little cold water on the stepping stone theory because only 10% of midlevel donors said that they plan to increase their donation, and just 13% have ever given a gift of $10,000 or more.

Alia McKee: Now, what we saw, as I mentioned with those Hands-on Donors, that subsample has given higher gifts, right? So those folks who are volunteering on boards who are really kind of rolling up their sleeves with you, they might be better major donor prospects than the rest of the sample. This tells us that while midlevel donors are deeply committed, they don’t always follow that straight path up, the traditional donor pyramid. On the legacy side, though, the opportunity is huge. Our research showed that over 30% of the participants in the study have already made a bequest, and 20% were considering one. So that is a strikingly high level of planned giving potential. Of course, as a side note, as anyone who leads planned giving work knows, the lack of children is the number one indicator of the likelihood of someone to make a bequest. But we also found an interesting finding that there appears to be a prime age window. Once a midlevel donor hits 70, they’ve already made the decision about who they’re leaving in their bequest. And when they start turning 58, 59, that’s when they start thinking about making a bequest. So there appears to be this window of opportunity between 58 and 69 that organizations can take into account.

Farra Trompeter: Fascinating. Well, there is just so much to dig into, but before we go, I would love to ask you if there is one thing you wish nonprofits would stop doing, and one thing you wish they would start doing as it relates to growing midlevel donors, what would it be?

Alia McKee: First, I wish they would stop under-resourcing midlevel programs. Too often, they are short-staffed, without a clear owner, without a clear strategy, and without a clear budget. And for a midlevel program to succeed, it cannot be an afterthought. And I wish more organizations would start tracking retention and lifetime value as their North Star metrics. Too many decisions about midlevel programs are still being made based on short-term ROI, I’m sure you know you’re hearing it. Farra. Is this going to return investment in 12 months? Is this going to return investment in 18 months? MidLevel is, by nature, a long game. When you look at this group through a lens of lifetime value, multi-year giving, and planned giving potential, the case for investment really becomes undeniable. But when you look at it in these short, direct response windows, it can be easy to ignore the potential.

Farra Trompeter: That’s really helpful. Well, again, so much to dig into here. Really encourage you to go to SeaChangeStrategies.com and look at the various reports they have produced, not just the ones we’ve talked about today. And you can learn more about their work. You can also connect with Alia on LinkedIn. Alia, thank you so much for joining us. But of course, before we go, anything else you’d like to share?

Alia McKee: Well, because I’m on with you, Farra, I just want to end by saying fundraising is relationship building, and we have to start thinking about that. It has to be the North Star. You know, even before the challenges of 2025 took hold, fundraising data from individuals was very sobering. Both Giving USA and the Fundraising Effectiveness Project show that 2024 was another year of stagnation; total dollars raised held steady, but the donor counts continued to fall down again after a 4.4% decline the year before. We have to start investing in meaningful relationships and recognizing the long-term value of each donor, of each volunteer, of each action-taker, of each website visitor, right? So we can start building back trust with donors and securing a more resilient supporter base. Our causes need it.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah, and I would just add through communications.

Alia McKee: Amen.

Farra Trompeter: So, yes. Well, Alia, thank you again for joining us today. And everyone, take a look at those donors with fresh eyes and have a great rest of your day.